The use of various forms of computing equipment to automate or otherwise perform a number of tasks has become widespread. With the proliferation of processor-based platforms, such as personal computers (PCs), tablet devices, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and servers, capable of executing instruction sets for providing specialized or generalized functionality, such as word processing, accounting, document generation and management, printing, data communication, and image capture, generation, and management, the use of such computing equipment has become nearly ubiquitous in both business as well as personal settings. One example of functionality that is provided through the use of such computing equipment is the automation of tasks associated with the shipment of items, including the management of item orders, managing the picking and packing of items for order fulfilment, generation of invoices, packing slips, manifests, shipping labels, and postage or other prepaid shipping indicia, and tracking of shipment of items through a shipping service provider. Such automation of item shipment management is provided, for example, by the SHIPSTATION shipping management system provided by Auctane LLC of Austin Tex.
With the advent of the Internet and the advent of innumerable e-commerce merchants, not only have the number of items shipped increased appreciably in recent years, but so too have the number of shippers and recipients of such items. It is commonplace for such merchants, whether they be “brick and mortar” merchants, online merchants, or sellers through an electronic marketplace (e.g., eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc.), to utilize computing equipment to facilitate their shipping goods using a number of forms of shipping services and media, such as letters, flats, and parcels, via various shipping service providers, such as the United States Postal Service (USPS), United Parcel Service (UPS), Federal Express (FedEx), Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn (DHL), and local and regional couriers. Accordingly, more and more shippers, including not only large scale business traditionally involved with high volume shipping but also less sophisticated smaller entities tasked with an appreciable number of shipments, are processing relatively large numbers of items for shipment.
Although various shipping management systems have automated many shipping functions, shipping management systems have generally provided for generation of shipping labels in a user interactive process, whereby the user interacts with the user interface throughout completion of generation of each shipping label. For example, a user of a shipping management system may select an order for generation of a shipping label and thereafter be required to step through functions such as verifying the order, selecting and/or confirming shipping parameters (e.g., shipment method, shipping service provider, shipment date, rating information, additional services, etc.), requesting generation of a shipping label, waiting for rate details to be presented, confirming rate details, selecting a shipping label creation option, waiting for a shipping label to be generated, reviewing and/or approving the generated shipping label, and printing or downloading the shipping label for use in shipping the item. In addition to inputting and/or selecting information at a number of these steps in the shipping label generation process, the user may be presented with various warnings and/or queries and be required to address one or more issues with respect to the generation of the shipping label, such as to purchase additional postage value where the shipping label is to include prepaid indicia and sufficient postage value is not otherwise present. The foregoing shipping label generation process is typically essentially captive-atomic, in that it must complete or be aborted before the user is free to perform other functions in the shipping management system, such as to initiate a process for generating a shipping label for another order or to otherwise perform shipping management functions independent of the then current shipping label generation process.
Such captive-atomic processing of shipping label generation functionality, although well suited for shipping management operation with respect to individual orders, can be very tedious and slow when a user is attempting to process a relatively large number of orders and their attendant shipments. For example, where the shipping label is to be generated to include prepaid postage indicia (e.g., postage indicia accepted by the USPS for shipping services), in addition to being presented with postage rate information for verification and acceptance in response to a shipping label generation request (a task which can be somewhat time consuming and quite repetitive in many shipping situations), the user must wait for operation at the postage indicia server to complete the processing required to generate the secure value bearing indium (a process that may require appreciable time in light of the secure vault protocols and cryptographic operations performed). Thus, the duration of the processing to generate a shipping label can be appreciable, and can aggregate in a situation where the user is processing shipping labels for a relatively large number of orders to comprise a substantial amount of time dedicated to shipping label generation. Even where a shipping label does not include value bearing indicium (e.g., shipping labels typically used by such shipping service providers as UPS, FedEx, and DHL), the generation of a number of shipping labels using the captive-atomic processing typically provided may nevertheless require an appreciable amount of time, including appreciable idol user time spent waiting for various operations to complete, dedicated to shipping label generation.